The Perfect Human

13 minutes | 2021 | Experimental | English | Chinese subtitles

Inspired by Jørgen Leth’s Black and White cult classic The Perfect Human (1968) which raises many simple yet philosophical questions about who the perfect human is, what it means to be human, or perfect, this animation The Perfect Human applies unsupervised machine learning and experimental filmmaking techniques to reexamine and question the contested notion of perfection in the eyes of artificial intelligence. Later the remake of the computer-generated moving images are transformed from digital recreation to an analog artifact of transparencies which completed the cycles from analog film to digital video and back to 16mm format, from motion pictures to still images, and then latent-space interpolation, from a proxy of human memories to the machine learning construct.

Lilan Yang (b. 1997, Chongqing, China), is an artist and experimental filmmaker, whose work delves into the flux of migration, the decay of memories and the intricacies of perception. Their work, rooted in 16mm filmmaking, is further enriched by machine learning and data visualization, exploring the materiality and temporality of film. Yang currently lives and works in Boston.